finished

The best thing about speaking at 9 AM on the first full day of the conference is that I’m now finished. I can take it easy and listen to all the other papers and enjoy all the dinners.

Weirdest thing heard at dinner last night… You’ve all heard of outsourcing software programming to India, I assume. Well, apparently some videogame players are now outsourcing the boring parts of videogames to players in China. In other words, if a particular game has a tedious procedure for building up character skills, just hire a Chinese player to do it for you.

As someone pointed out during the coffee break today, this would be the rare ironic case well-suited for child labor: kids love playing videogames, and kids tend not to be as bothered as adults are by mindlessly repetitive things.